In many industrial and business environments, workers are often required to repetitively lift, position and orient tools, sometimes of significant weight, and deploy them anywhere within the reach of their arms, from low to overhead to extend out in front. The resulting stresses, particularly from overhead usages, or near-full extension of the arm, are a common cause of work-related shoulder and forearm injuries.
Ergonomic equipment supports are known in the art, including ‘tool balancers’ that suspend tools on wires from retractable reels. Tool balancers require unobstructed access to overhead, usually fixed, attachment points, which tend to restrict the users lateral freedom of movement. Also, since the tools usually dangle in a bottom heavy condition from crude attaching eyelets, maintaining a desired angular orientation is impeded. Even those few balancer installations that connect to annular bearings around the tool body are still restrictive of other axes of freedom. Furthermore, they can only be installed on tools of a cylindrical construction that permit the unobstructed passage of the inner bearing race along the tool body to the desired point of attachment. Importantly, such balancers cannot be used at all for work locations that are inaccessible to overhead support, such as underneath cars on assembly lines.
Articulated support arms that do not require overhead mounting exist for supporting cameras and medical devices such as x-ray machines. Some may include two or three-axis gimbal attachments to provide angular freedom between the arm and the supported equipment, but these gimbal designs are not appropriate for the majority of tool configurations and/or conditions of use. Additionally, the center-of-gravity of a given tool is often located within a non-cylindrical section of the tool body, which may be inaccessible to the sliding installation of a bearing of appropriate size. Conventional gimbals also cannot be conveniently and quickly removed to facilitate the use of the tool in a separate location, or the rapid replacement of the tool with another. The use of conventional three-axis gimbals would mandate a proliferation of expensive supporting and orienting means, each adapted to a different tool, to be located within the same workplace or production line station.
Accordingly, there is a need for versatile, ergonomic, and angularly agile tool support systems, which can accommodate tools of various sizes, shapes, configurations and internal distributions of mass. There is also a need for a support system allowing the quick replacement and substitution of tools within the local workplace, without cluttering the tools with redundant and expensive affixed hardware.
What is needed is a quickly removable gimbal attachment, adaptable to be mounted around the tool's center-of-mass, and that provides substantially unrestricted angular freedom for orienting and positioning a variety of tools, but is preferably not bulky or expensive.
What is also needed is an angularly agile tool mount that can accommodate a tool around its center of mass, even if obstructions, bends, bulges or projections prevent the sliding installation of a conventional, unitary bearing assembly.